Hands on: Pluribo aims to summarize the web

With a goal of conquering the informational flood of the Internet, Pluribo has …

Pluribo is a startup that's drowning in the same virtual sea of user-generated content as the rest of us. The company has developed a technology that can automatically summarize user reviews on the web, and its first consumer product is a Firefox add-on that tackles the tsunami of product reviews at Amazon. Ars Technica went hands-on with Pluribo's review summary product and spoke with one of the company's founders about the present and future of summarizing the user-generated web.

The overview

The process of installing the Pluribo: Instant Summaries Firefox add-on is just like any other, though after restarting Firefox, a confirmation page opens to offer a primer for Pluribo. A few links to Amazon products with a healthy batch of reviews are offered to help users get started.

For now, Pluribo "works best" with products in Amazon's electronics category. It's important to point out that Pluribo isn't trying to be a filter for reviews, especially since sites like Amazon already provide those kinds of tools. Pluribo looks through all reviews for a product and summarizes them with an algorithm that looks for consistent themes and frequent keywords, presenting an overview of both positive and negative reviews instead of, say, only the best five-star raves or most negative detractors.

Browsing to an item, Pluribo will display an overlay at the bottom of Firefox's window containing a summary of how many reviews the product has, a sentence or two that summarizes the significant pros and cons of the device, and a link for displaying reviews with numerical scores in key areas like "price" and "reliability." This overlay doesn't change the layout or in any way interfere with Amazon's product page, and it can easily be closed if you want Pluribo to get out of your way completely.

After browsing through a few electronics items, I was surprised to see how consistently literate Pluribo's summarization is. For example, the two sentences Pluribo produced from the 411 reviews on the Canon SD750 I own are "Despite issues with the interface, reviewers like the speed, durability, and LCD. If you can handle the interface, it's a decent option."

When presenting its summary, Pluribo underlines specific keywords that are found throughout the reviews. Hovering over these underlined words produces a speedometer graph ranging from "bad" to "good," with choice quotes that offer a glimpse into why reviewers were keen or harsh on that particular aspect of the product. This is a great way to present this information, but I was disappointed that I couldn't click on the review quotes to be taken to the full review.

Hovering over a link to "numerical scores" presents a bar graph with data compiled from reviews of the specific item and the average for its category. No actual numbers are presented here, however, only factors like "ease," "reliability," "price," "size," etc.

The future

I asked Samidh Chakrabarti, one of Pluribo's founders, where the company hopes to take its technology. Besides expanding across the rest of Amazon's categories and products, of course, Chakrabarti said "We plan to expand the capabilities of this technology not only to other e-commerce sites, but also to non-shopping sites (like movies, restaurants, etc.) Basically, wherever there is a large concentration of user reviews on the internet, we want to be able to help people sort through them."

While summarizing other types of non-review content isn't on the company's roadmap for now, Chakrabarti said the company is listening to user feedback. He also admitted that, "in many ways, summarizing facts is actually a lot easier than summarizing opinions." Pluribo's current focus on user-generated reviews and opinions is certainly a useful one, but I can see all kinds of other consumer applications for things like long Wikipedia entries and even articles like the one you're reading.

Right now Pluribo's business model involves harnessing the affiliate programs of the retailers it has on its current roadmap. "In cases where people purchase an item based on Pluribo's evaluation, we may collect a commission from our merchant partners," the company says in a media FAQ.

Down the road, however, Pluribo plans to license its summary engine, and the company has a few announcements about this end of its business model planned for the first several months.

Summarizing Pluribo

My main complaint for Pluribo from a usability standpoint, however, is that it doesn't help users access the information it's summarizing. Pluribo did a pretty good job of summarizing over 2,000 reviews for the Garmin's nüvi GPS, but its Firefox add-on doesn't offer any easy way for accessing individual reviews to explore why one particular reviewer was positive or negative about an aspect of a product. Perhaps this kind of access can be added in a future version so Pluribo can provide both a bird's-eye view and targeted, fine-grained access for when a user needs it.

That said, Pluribo is on to something with this summarization engine. The web is increasingly pummeling its visitors with too much information, and technology like this has the potential to give users a birds-eye view of product reviews, travel recommendations, and even large bodies of factual information.